1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a technology of analyzing a behavior of the human body by simulation using a computer, by the use of a human body model defined on the computer.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
There has existed a field where an accurate analysis of a behavior of the human body is desired One example is a field where a vehicle structure is designed so as to mitigate as much as possible the degree of deformation of a vehicle occupant due to the application of an external impact to the vehicle, from the view of the improvement in safety of the vehicle under impact.
In such a field, the analysis of a behavior of the human body was conventionally effected, using the whole or a part of a mechanical dummy substituting a real human body, or using a model provided by modeling not the whole but a part of the human body on a computer, in general.
For example, in the aforementioned field of designing the vehicle structure, historically, a whole human body dummy instead of a real human body was seated on a seat of a real vehicle, and subsequently a real vehicle test was conducted using the real vehicle, such that the real vehicle was held in the same state as mentioned above, and such that the real vehicle was made to really come into contact with a real obstacle or barrier, for thereby validating safety of the real vehicle under impact.
However, in the above conventional technologies, in some cases, a human body dummy failed to represent or reproduce a behavior of a real human body at a sufficient degree of fidelity. In addition, as is evident from the above explanation, in the above conventional technologies, although there existed a case where a human body model was used on a computer, neither modeling the whole human body on a computer, nor analyzing by simulation a behavior of the human body using a model representing the whole human body on a computer, was conducted.
For the above reasons, none of the conventional analyzing approaches mentioned above was capable of analyzing a behavior of the human body at a sufficient high degree of the analyzing accuracy.